process management

workflow, workload, work control

Workflowrepresents
a way of managing office-based work in terms of the demands of the individual
work item. It therefore focuses on prompt and effective response (resolution
and expediting of each transaction).

Workloadrepresents
a way of managing office-based work in terms of the available resources
and structures. It therefore focuses on throughput and utilization.

Work controlrepresents
the management balance between workflow and workload. This is an important
strategic issue for many organizations.

On this page, we shall be focusing on office work, although
similar principles apply to other forms of organized work.

what is a process?

A process is a connected set of activities with a coherent purpose.

Processes are traditionally thought of in sequential terms. The so-called
value
chain is a sequential process in which each step contributes in an
incremental way to the purpose or outcome of the whole process. (But new
business processes are often too complex to be accounted for in these terms.)

In some offices, the workflow perspective is dominant. The urgency and
nature of the incoming events constrain the work. Everything is oriented
and geared towards responding to these events.

In some offices, the workload perspective is dominant. The resources,
capabilities and structures constrain the work. You cannot do the work
any other way without acquiring new resources or additional capabilities.
There is no flexibility in the existing structures.

In some offices, however, neither of these perspectives is dominant.
The work is not wholely determined by capabilities or by events. There
is some freedom of choice within the office, to organize the work. We might
imagine that it is one of the goals of technology (including CSCW) to achieve
this happy state.

We are then faced with the management question: who is to exercise this
freedom of choice. Sometimes it will be left to the individual workers
to sequence and organize their work, within some defined limits. Sometimes
managers will wish, for various reasons, to impose some standards on the
work, in addition to the constraints implicit in the work itself. These
are issues of autonomy and authority, sometimes called deontic issues.

Management Dilemmas

A purely event-driven workflow faces the following dilemma.
Either you've got enough excess capability / capacity to deliver the required
quality of service even at peaks of demand or contingency, or service degrades.
Think of an Accident & Emergency ward in a typical hospital. Think
of websites that had to be taken off-line because the installed boxes couldn't
cope with unexpectedly high traffic.

Margaret Thatcher used to complain when television crews brought what
she saw as excess people to film interviews at Number 10, and used this
as evidence of chronic overmanning. But look at this from a risk perspective
- imagine a journalist losing an interview with the prime minister because
of some technical problem, and having to explain this to the managing editor.

A workload may be optimized for cost, or for security/reliability,
but possibly not both. Such processes are usually (but not always) fairly
inflexible. Workload depends on a reasonable backlog
of work. Sometimes the workload is designed around the assumption of a
balanced mix of demands. There are risks relating to the length of the
backlog, and also its composition. Think of an oil refinery, designed on
the assumption that the demand for petrol will be between x% and y% of
the total mix. Or a hospital operating theatre, designed on the assumption
that a given percentage of operations will require a given piece of equipment.

Note: a hospital also depends on a reasonably stable mix of three kinds
of work: urgent and unpredictable (accidents and emergencies), planned
(childbirth, long-term repeated treatments such as chemotherapy) and moveable
/ discretionary (hip replacements).

Top-down directive leadership
may be more effective in a crisis,
or with inexperienced staff, but doesn't provide space for local autonomy,
responsiveness, flexibility or growth. While bottom-up evolution of working
practices arguably cannot sustain bold or radical initiatives. This seems
to imply a contradiction between BPR (top-down change) and TQM (bottom-up
change facilitated from the top). (Such a contradiction has been widely
prophesied by management gurus.)

Process design can make an organisation more robust or it can make
it more vulnerable. Notions of robustness or vulnerability relate to time
horizon, as well as scope. Short-term robust may equate to long-term vulnerability,
and vice versa. (In the short-term, the triceratops was robust, the mouse
vulnerable. But the mouse survived.)

Workflow

workflow

Workflow focuses on the whole transaction.

Workflow management can be directed at strategic goals:

customer satisfaction

worker empowerment

partner relationships

Workflow can be understood at multiple levels:

from task to task.

from worker to worker

from department to department

from company to company

Workflow focuses on the whole transaction.

Einstein’s conceptual innovation was to think of light as if you were
sitting astride the lightbeam. In a similar conceptual innovation, BPR-enthusiasts
like to think of workflow as if they were perched on the document or casefile..

Transaction Drive. The transaction is goal-oriented. Like a light
beam, it wants to reach its destination. This is the crucial difference
between the transaction focus and the task focus. Bureaucrats are motivated
merely to pass work onto the next bureaucrat, and not to get the transaction
completed. Where there is a chain of bureacrats, or a complex interaction
between multiple agencies, is quite easy for each bureaucrat to deny responsibility
for any delay, each claiming that one of the others is holding things up.

A colleague gave me a good example. There was a long
delay building a pedestrian crossing in his neighbourhood. It turned out
to be due to a lack of coordination between the local authority and the
Ministry of Transport.

Long-term diarized transactions. Workflow management tools may be
used to manage long-term diarized transactions, consisting of date-triggered
steps. Conveyancing of house purchases, or the purchasing of agricultural
commodities (sugar, tobacco), may take months.

Level of computerization. Many computer people like to think
of transactions in computer terms. But in a typical business, considerable
amounts of transaction activity typically don’t touch the computer system
at all.

Workflow management can be directed at strategic goals.

Customer satisfaction

Instead of looking at individual transactions, concentrate on providing
high levels of customer service.

Worker empowerment

What do knowledge workers spend their time doing?

data entry

progress chasing

fault chasing, fault correction

customer satisfaction

Empowerment entails breaking down the barriers between designing and doing.
The worker becomes the manager and designer of his/her own work. The knowledge
worker is not enacting a pre-programmed sequence of tasks, but judging
the appropriate tasks to perform at a given time to achieve customer satisfaction.

How does this notion of empowered work fit with traditional notions
of quality management, as represented by ISO 9000?

Workflow can be understood at several levels.

From task to task

To understand workflow, we start with a diagram that shows the dependencies
between tasks. Such models should be familiar to practitioners of structured
system design methods..

These models support an important system design principle, namely to
avoid building unnecessary sequencing constraints into the system.

When people describe processes, they usually describe
a set of tasks in a particular sequence. However, there may be good reasons
in some circumstances to perform the tasks in some other sequence. If a
computer system has been narrowly specified, it may make alternative task
sequences difficult or impossible.

To understand workflow, we usually need to include document flows and material
flows in these models, as well as pure data flows.

Some structured design methods ignored these other flows.

Interesting things happen when a transaction divides into parallel streams
that require synchronization or rejoining.

A long time ago, I used to teach systems analysis courses.
I’d get the students to model a film processing company. Unprocessed films
would arrive together with customer payment and return address. The films
would be tagged, the data would be captured, the film would be processed,
and then the data would be reunited with the processed film. The students
could design systems that would do this - but their systems could not tolerate
the slightest error. If a tag fell off, tough.

Similar requirements arise with customer communications systems.

Suppose a customer writes a letter containing a request
for information, an instruction to amend an order, and a complaint about
a previous transaction. Do you write three separate letters back? Or do
you wait until you can answer (or at least acknowledge) all three items
in one letter?

From worker to worker

Now we come on to work that is shared between several workers.

The technology base for such workflow is CSCW. The workers
may be in the same office, connected via a LAN, or may be geographically
dispersed.

The communication between the workers may be data-oriented
or may be hybrid ‘multi-media’.

We can use this mode of workflow for specifying team procedures.

For example, how does a team of developers and users
cooperate on the building and confirmation of a requirements model?

Workflow management tools can be used to help define software
processes. They therefore have a place in software quality management.

From department to department

When we consider process chains that span several departments, there
is often a tension between the departments. Each department manager is
trying to optimize her own operations.

Traditional Business Process Reengineering (BPR) offers a programme
of global optimization, across the whole process chain. According to the
BPR experts, this needs to be sponsored by a level of management with authority
and responsibility over the entire process chain.

From company to company

If a process chain spans many organizations, standard BPR won’t work,
because there is no authority for radical change. Instead, radical change
usually requires some form of political action.

Some extreme examples of local optimization leading to
globally unsatisfactory results can be found in the UK Health Service.
A typical example: a community rehabilitation centre is short of funds,
which means patients cannot be discharged from hospital, which means that
new patients cannot be admitted to the hospital, which means that the community
health resources are diverted to caring for people awaiting hospital treatment,
thus reducing further the resources available for rehabilitation in the
community.

The British Government is currently engaged in a long-term
political programme to reengineer the UK Health Service, using the concept
of the Internal Market. This is highly controversial, and there is no space
here to take sides in this debate.

Responsibility handover. The greatest opportunities
for patient dissatisfaction occur at the interfaces between different agencies.
But the tensions between the agencies are not merely economic. Each agency
operates within a different professional paradigm, and thinks it knows
best what is in the interests of patients.

Workflow requires coordination between several levels

If we put these levels together, we get a composite picture.

Several perspectives on workflow

From the perspective of the department manager: local optimization. (The
same is true of the separate agency in a system involving many organizations.
The Health Service is full of examples.)

From the perspective of the IT manager: the worker is a ‘user’, whose prime
responsibility is to enter perfect data.

From the worker’s perspective.

From the quality controller’s perspective

How important is workflow to your organization? Should you be doing
or planning anything in this area? What do you see as the main issues,
pains, benefits of managing workflow?

Which form(s) of workflow are most relevant to your organization?
Who is best placed to do the analysis: user, IT, HR, … ?

Workload

From a workload management perspective. the main preoccupation is in
the utilization and scheduling of resources.

The office manager needs to make decisions to maintain the throughput
and efficiency of the office.

Is the backlog of work increasing or decreasing?

Should we pay people overtime to clear the backlog?

Should we schedule other lower-priority work?

Resource specialization

Do we want to have some resources dedicated to particular types of
activity?

This question applies both to people and to machines.

We may want everyone in the office to be able to handle
every stage of the work, or we may want people to specialize in different
stages.

We may devote one computer to message handling or file
handling, or we may put some of this work onto each of the computers on
the office network.

Specialist resources can sometimes be more efficient at given levels of
throughput, but may be much less flexible when throughput levels or other
circumstances change. Employers are increasingly keen on negotiating flexible
working arrangements with staff, and usually encourage staff to become
competent at a range of tasks.

If the required range of tasks is coherent and manageable, then the
employee may gain in job satisfaction.

Resource allocation

In a large office, there may be many people capable of handling a particular
case. One of the key functions of workflow/workload management is to assign
incoming events to resources.

From a workflow management perspective, this is done to expedite the
transaction. From a workload management perspective, this is done to balance
the load on the available resources. These perspectives may not always
coincide.

In the worst case, this can create a positive disincentive to individual
efficiency. If Jo can complete a task in 12 minutes, and Chris can complete
the same task in 11 minutes, then a workflow-oriented manager will only
direct incoming cases to Jo when Chris is already busy. Whereas a workload-oriented
manager will share the work more fairly between Jo and Chris.

Task mix

A variety of tasks helps with utilization as well as job satisfaction..

For example, if you've got ten minutes before a meeting, there's no
point starting a long and complicated task.

However, in some cases, a level of self-discipline or supervision may
be required, otherwise you can spend the whole day on small tasks, and
never get your teeth into the large tasks.

Work Control: Workflow versus Workload

The workflow perspective focuses on prompt and effective resolution
of each case.

The workload perspective focuses on throughput, performance metrics
and cost-effective processing of a large number of cases.

There are many situations where these different perspectives collide.

For example, in book publishing, the author wishes to
get his book into print as quickly as possible, But the publisher
wants to keep down the cost of support services, such as editing, proof-reading,
indexing, cover design, typesetting, and printing, in an industry where
rush jobs are charged at a premium rate.

In the health service, medical staff are concerned about
individual patients, while adminstrators are concerned about bed occupancy
and waiting lists.

An important strategic issue for such organizations is to balance these
two perspectives.

Balance

One way of thinking about work management is that it requires a coordination
between supply and demand.

The organization of demand is represented by workflow: this is the
work that is required.

The organization of supply is represented by workload: this is what
supplies the required work.

In some cases, the available resources constrain the organization of
work. In the short term at least, there is no other way to carry out the
work.

In other cases, there are several ways to organize the available resources
to carry out the work. The work is constrained by the demands placed on
the work, which are so pressing as to give no room for choice in the response.

In other cases again, an office has considerable freedom of action to
organize the work.

Authority &Autonomy

Where the organization of the work is not totally constrained by the
supply structure (the available resources), or by demand structure (the
urgency of the demand), then there are some choices to be made.

This raises the question: who exercises these choices? Is it appropriate
to leave these choice up to the individual workers? Or is there a need
for consistency and coordination, so that the choices need to be made at
a higher level within the management hierarchy, and imposed on the work?

In some cases, management may impose working practices on a working
environment.They may create a range of incentives and inhibitors for staff,
or define authorization mechanisms for exceptional cases.Computer systems
may be designed to help enforce such management edicts.

Competingprocesses

Some resources may be used by different processes. Sometimes one process
has higher priority than another.

Software developers often share some computing and network resources
with operating mission-critical systems. It is often taken for granted
that production takes precedence over maintenance, and corrective maintenance
takes precedence over normal software development.

Resources are often cheaper if you are willing to accept a lower level
of availability, or a reduced guarantee of service.

Liberation& Control

Many computer system designers have a covert (and sometimes unconscious)
agenda. Some believe in control, and will add controls to the system as
if on principle. Others believe in liberation, and will try to design systems
that encourage horizontal communications and subvert hierarchical authority.
(Many of these designers are sadly ineffectual, and often unwittingly achieve
the opposite of their intentions.)

There are important strategic issues at stake, and these should not
be left to the bad habits and untested assumptions of computer system designers.

Front officeBack office

A common organization pattern is to separate the work into "front office
and "back office". The front office is customer-facing and possibly workflow-driven,
the back office is almost certainly workload-driven. The structural issues
here are to do with maintaining loose coupling and synchronization between
front office and back office, as well as in the information systems supporting
both.

Workload and Backlog

Zero Backlog. Campers know that there are two types
of wood for a campfire. Pinewood burns quickly and brightly, and leaves
no residue. Deciduous wood burns more slowly, and produces glowing embers
that are great for cooking. The "backlog" is a large piece of deciduous
wood that keeps the fire going - especially when the night gets colder
and damper.

The internet business is fast, bright,
and views backlog with scorn. When times get hard, it has no staying power.

Traditional manufacturing has always maintained a backlog. This allows
factories to work at a regular pace, without tight coupling to the fluctuations
of demand. When times are hard, you can continue to produce stock for future
demand - at least for a while.

Outsourcing has often been seen as a better way of shielding a company
against fluctuations of demand. Just-in-time supply
chains take pride in the absence of inventory and backlog. But there
are limits to this approach. "Inventory-free companies do not escape the
business cycle or disruptions in demand." (Peter Martin, Financial Times,
September 24th, 2001)

Lack of backlog is also a feature of the service industry generally.
After the events of September 11th, travel plans were curtailed, and normally
crowded airports and aeroplanes were suddenly half-empty. The airline industry
has no buffer against such sudden cuts in demand.